1. U214A Chapters 4, 5 & 6

2. Chapter 4: Word Building Words are not the smallest units of a language; they may consist of smaller parts that have a meaning of their own. In linguistics, these parts are called morphemes. Morphemes may be free or bound. A free morpheme can be found either on its own or in combination with other morphemes. Brush, for example, is a free morpheme; it can occur independently as brush, or in words such as hairbrush, toothbrush and airbrushed. A bound morpheme never occurs on its own. An example is bio-, which occurs in words like biology, biography, … but not as an independent word. In English most morphemes are free.

3. Free morphemes can operate on their own, but they can also join up with other free morphemes to form compounds examples: fingerprint, homepage, airconditioning, … etc. Notice that compound words are often hyphenated, and that the use of hyphen is not always consistent. For example, you may come across airconditioning or air-conditioning, homepage or home- page. They are still compounds, whichever way they are spelt. Another way of building words is through derivation, which involves bound morphemes. For example, adding the bound morpheme –er to the stem build produces the derived word builder, and adding the bound morpheme dis- to the stem agree produces the derived word disagree. Bound morphemes that are added to stems are called affixes.

4. Derivational affixes include both prefixes, which come before the stem, like un-, be- and mis-, and suffixes, which come after the stem, like –ness, -ly, -ship and –ation. For example: unhappy, happiness, happily, befriend, friendly, friendship, information, …. Despite their flexibility, the use of derivational affixes follows certain regular patterns depending on word class e.g. -ness is typically added to adjectives, not to nouns or verbs. So you can have happiness but not womanness.

5. Some derivational affixes maintain the word class of the word to which they are attached. This is the case with prefixes. For example, acceptable is an adjective, and so is unacceptable. Only a few prefixes change the class of a word. For example, friend is a noun but befriend is a verb. Suffixes, on the other hand, often involve a change of word class, like -dom which changes adjectives to nouns e.g. wise (adj.) and wisdom (noun). So most (but not all) derivational suffixes change the class of the word they’re attached to, and most (but not all) derivational prefixes maintain word class. What they both have in common, however, is that they create new words.

6. Linguists use a special term, lexeme, to talk about a word in all its related forms e.g. trap, traps, trapped and trapping are all forms of the same lexeme trap. Entrap is a separate lexeme, which also includes the related forms entraps, entrapping and entrapped. Entrapment is a different lexeme, and so is trapper. Dictionaries normally provide a separate entry for each lexeme. So we can now define derivation more precisely as the process by which new lexemes are created. En-, -er and -ment are derivational affixes because they create new lexemes.

7. Sometimes affixes are used to indicate a grammatical function, rather than to create a new lexeme, this is known as inflection. Inflectional affixes do not change word class, and in English they are always suffixes. English has relatively few inflectional affixes compared to other European languages. One of the problems you may encounter with inflectional affixes is that some of these affixes have alternative forms. For example, the past participle affix may be -en (as in been, taken, driven) or -ed (as in waited, parted, sliced), but with many verbs it can take other forms, as in dealt, or understood. The past tense affix is usually -ed, but again there are many exceptions, like began or went.

8. Alternative forms can occur not only with inflectional affixes, but with any kind of morphemes. For example, we say five, but fifteen (not *fiveteen). Alternative forms of the same morpheme are known as allomorphs. To sum up, the focus in this chapter has been on word building, and on recognizing that words are built up from morphemes – smaller parts that have their own meaning. The main ways of creating new words in english are compounding (when free morphemes join together) and derivation (when an affix is added to a stem). Although inflection also involves affixes, it is a different kind of process, since it makes the grammatical function of a word, without creating a new lexeme.

9. Chapter 5 Words that go together The tendency of words to keep company with each other is known as collocation. We can say, for example, that escape and clutches collocate, in other words, that they frequently occur together. In any given context, there are some words which have a high probability of occurrence, and other words which have extremely low probability. Why do some words collocate while others do not? Collocational restrictions are sometimes due to the sense of the items involved. For example, chew a satellite is unlikely to occur, simply because the sense of chew is unlikely to apply to satellites.

10. Unlikely collocations can sometimes arise when speakers are trying to produce colorful language. For example, you can describe someone as being as useful as a chocolate teapot. So even words with incongruous (odd or strange) senses may collocate. On the other hand, words with congruous senses do not necessarily collocate e.g. synonyms; although they may appear to have exactly the same sense, they are not interchangeable in all contexts. For example, knotty and difficult, you can say knotty problems but not knotty times or words instead we use difficult.

11. You may have found it difficult to decide whether or not a particular combination of words is frequent. When it comes to judging frequency in language we cannot rely on our intuition. Now the internet has made it possible to investigate collocation much more easily than before. But when you use the internet to investigate language you need to consider context as well as just statistics. Many words are ambiguous (with more than one sense) and the collocation of one sense often differ from the collocations of another sense. Like the word pine when it collocates with wood or furniture it means full of knots, but when it means difficult or complicated it collocates with words like problem, issue, topic.

12. When collocation of words become tightly linked, they start to function as if they were a single unit. Imagine, for example, that you want to tell a friend about nearly missing a train and you begin to explain, We just got there in the nick of … You would not need to stop and think what word to say next – it must obviously be time. The phrase in the nick of time doesn’t have to be assembled word by word; instead it’s available ready-made, and you can slot it into a sentence as a unit. Fixed expressions like in the nick of time and come a cropper are examples of particularly strong collocation, known as idioms.

13. Idioms differ from ordinary collocation in two main respects. Firstly, the meaning of an idiom is not predictable from the meaning of the words it contains. The meaning of take someone to the cinema can be worked out from the meaning of take and cinema, but the meaning of take someone to the cleaner cannot be deuced in this way; you just have to know that it means to cheat someone of all their money. Secondly, another feature of idioms is that their forms is relatively fixed; you cannot change the grammar of them in the same way that you can for other expressions. Look for example at the following sentences using the idiom put a sock in it, meaning ‘shut up’, ‘be quiet’: -It’s time to put a sock in it. -You need to put a sock in it.

14. Despite the grammatical restrictions there is still a certain amount of flexibility in their use. When linguists came to inspect the way idioms are used in real life, they were surprised to find how much speakers play around with them creatively. With many idioms, a literal interpretation is also possible. For instance land on your feet has the idiomatic meaning ‘emerge successfully from a difficult situation’, but if you talk about a gymnast landing on her feet, you would probably be using the words with their literal meaning.

15. Advertisers use a variety of techniques to attract the attention of the public and make their message more memorable. One of these techniques is to exploit collocation, by putting words together in striking or unusual ways.

16. Chapter 6 lexical variation If we define synonyms as words which have the same sense, then climb and ascend are indeed synonyms. Yet although the sense of the two words is the same, you may feel that there is a significant difference between them. The difference between climb and ascend is one of a style, and style depends on the situation in which the language is being used. The ability to choose lexis (vocabulary) appropriate to the situation is an important part of learning to use a language.

17. The style we learn first tends to be informal; it is appropriate in casual settings among family and friends. At the other extreme, a very formal style is appropriate in highly structured situations, particularly where communication is one-way, for example, an invitation to an embassy reception, or a speech at a memorial service. Or we may choose a neutral style depending on the situation.

18. Writing tends to be more formal than speech. When we write we are more likely to be conscious of the possibility of misunderstanding, and to plan more carefully what we say. In speech there is less time to plan, and it is easier to check that the listener is following what we say. Yet, sometimes a planned speech on a formal occasion may be just as formal as written text, and conversely, a quick-free written message such as a text or a tweet may be as informal as a conversation. The term colloquial, meaning conversational, can therefore apply to any kind of casual language, whether it is actually spoken or just written in the style of speech

19. Formal lexis often tends to be longer than informal lexis, and is more likely to have a Latin origin; compare for example, get/obtain, so/consequently, crash/collision. Informal lexis is more likely to derive from Old English (Anglo Saxon). Also slang and swear-words tend to come from Old English. Informal language tend also to be less precise than formal language. For example, if the phone rings at home you might say ‘Can you get that?’ rather than ‘Can you answer the phone?’ Get is a word of many meanings so it is less specific than answer, and similarly, that is less specific than the phone.

20. Legal language is sometimes described as jargon – a word that carries negative associations. Any professional field has its own specialized lexis which may be seen by outsiders as difficult and confusing. The term jargon, however is often applied when the language is unnecessarily complicated. Specialized lexis is not restricted to professional fields ; it occurs wherever a group of people share an interest in a topic which they need to discuss in greater depth than other people would do.

21. A language variety that is characteristic of a particular group of speakers is known as a dialect. It has particular features in its grammar and vocabulary that distinguish it from other dialects. It may also have a particular accent associated with it, but there is a difference between dialect and accent. Many English speakers have a regional accent, but use standard English grammar and vocabulary rather than their local dialect. Standard English is itself a dialect of English. Geographically, it originates from the area between London, Oxford and Cambridge, but it became particularly influential as the language of the court and the universities.

22. Dialect differences tend to be levelled out as social mobility increases. Why does change happen? One reason is that language is not passed on perfectly to each new generation. The influences that shape a child’s language are not the same as those that shaped his or her parents’ language. So every generation speaks a little differently from those that went before, and young people often deliberately amplify differences to mark out their own style and establish their own identity.

23. English itself has spread across the world, establishing itself in many countries as a first or second language. Many of these places have their own particular variety of English, with a characteristic grammar, lexis and accent. If globalization and telecommunications can reduce dialect differences in English by exposing people to other dialects, does this mean that these national varieties are also likely to disappear, leaving us all speaking a universal English? This might seem a logical trend, but there are factors that work against it. For example, exposure to outside influences varies greatly in different communities and households. Whatever happens, we will never all experience exactly the same influences.

24. It is true that there are pressures towards standardization, including increased efficiency. However, there are other pressures that help to reinforce both national varieties and regional dialects, including for example, a sense of identity, of solidarity, and of pride in one’s own community. While Standard English may be required in many situations there occasions on which it is still appropriate to use a local variety of English.